When Caden investor Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo in 1994, he and other early internet pioneers probably couldn’t have predicted that roughly 30 years later, their innovations would be at the center of political and ethical questions related to user data privacy, according to tech entrepreneur John Roa.
In those early days, people weren’t as aware of the data extraction that was happening, he explained. “We thought we were just connecting with our college buddies on Facebook,” Roa, who sold his design firm to Salesforce in 2015, said. “But in reality, we were just siphoning data to the powers-that-be and creating trillion-dollar companies that never really explained to us they were doing that.”
In 2021, Yang approached Roa to invest in Caden, an app that lets users consent to sharing their data with companies like Amazon or Uber for advertising purposes. In exchange, users receive a slice of revenue. The app, which recently soft-launched, markets itself as a sort of solution to mounting data privacy concerns in recent years that have seen a number of tech juggernauts, such as Meta and TikTok, come under fire.
Caden acts as a go-between for users and the advertisers seeking their data, letting people link their personal data from different companies, like Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, with the app’s “vault.”
According to Roa, Caden’s first tier anonymizes and aggregates users’ data after they consent to sharing it. That data is then sold to financial institutions and similar orgs that might want to use it to analyze things like consumer behavior trends, for instance, he said. Currently, users can expect to make approximately $15 a month “if they connect to all of the available sources” in the current tier of data personalization available, Roa said.
Its other tiers, which aren’t available yet, are more advertising-focused. Its second tier will let users consent to sharing data that advertisers can use for targeting purposes, though Roa said it wouldn’t be personally identifiable. Brands could use this data to target ads to specific demographics, like “people who take more than 50 Ubers a year, or people who have watched this film,” he explained.
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“We will never share identity, but it allows advertisers to reach a customer in really clever ways that will actually provide better advertisements for people that still protect their privacy,” he said.
A third tier, which he expects to not roll out until next year or 2025, would let brands directly target individuals based on personal data they’ve shared; Roa used the example of Netflix recommending a documentary on the Tour de France to someone that it can see has “gotten into cycling recently” based on information that person has shared with the streamer.
After the soft launch of the app, there are currently 3,000–4,000 users on Caden, Roa estimated, and it acquired over 100 million data points in under two weeks. So far, Caden has raised $9.4 million in seed funding, from investors including Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. The company is “in discussions on our next round of venture capital, which will be Series A,” Roa said.
Though legislators have been increasingly focused on data privacy, Roa said that he sees Caden’s “more consent-focused” model as a potential way forward.
“What’s funny or sad, depending on your perspective about privacy and privacy legislation, especially in this country, is it’s one of the few bipartisan issues we have,” he said. “Our government can’t agree on what color the sky is. But for some reason, both sides of the aisle love data privacy, and it’s really because one side hates Big Tech and one side hates regulation.”
Correction, 5/10/23: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect Yang's involvement with Caden.